Wagner Hangover!

(but first, another photo of Venice. That's St. Mark's Square - you can just see the domes - from some boat I was on.)

The performance of Die Meistersinger at the Volksoper (or “People’s Opera House”) last night was incredible. You know how it is with Wagner; you think you aren’t going to be able to stand a third act that lasts about two and a half hours, and by the end you are saying, “Over already? Play it again!” That’s the way it was with this production. The male voices were magnificent. I wanted to marry Hans Sachs (both the character and the singer who played him). Admittedly, there were some bizarre and disturbing moments in this particular production (which had a sort of Norman Rockwell look, believe it or not), smacking a bit of S & M, or at least bondage. People kept grabbing Eva and yanking her around the stage, and then at the end when she’s being “offered” as the bride to the winner of the singing contest, she was sort of tied up briefly (I am not joking). The worst part was during the Bacchanalian revel scene at the end of act two, where David is beating the crap out of Beckmesser and then the next time you see him he (David) is getting it on (to put it mildly) with Magdalene, and I mean REALLY gross stuff was going on. Like worse than I have ever seen on an opera stage. It was sick. Of course, what is Wagner about if not excess (and people saying "Heil," particularly in large crowds)?

That's the Volksoper building.

Fortunately, of course, Wagner’s music is so transcendent and miraculous that none of those little peccadilloes (did I spell that right?) mattered in the least, and by the end I was weeping, along with the large Austrian man in the seat next to me, who had sat through much of the opera with his fists clenched with the intensity of the emotion he was feeling. It was about 90 degrees plus in the theater – no air conditioning for either the audience or the singers or the orchestra – and the singers were sweating so much their costumes were completely soaked. The only person I didn’t see sweat at all was the conductor. He was unbelievably composed throughout, and conducted in what I thought was a very Wagnerian style, which is to say he presented us with a “solid wall of sound” (as our professor described it this morning) or I might say a dense and undifferentiated luscious liquid of sound in which we were immersed for five and a half hours. What a sensation! When we came out of the theater there was another one of those incredible Austrian thunderstorms. We ducked into a charming café where a pianist was playing Strauss waltzes. When we got home, we were all still keyed up and sat up on the rooftop patio until 1 am, watching the lightning, drinking wine, and toasting the great Richard Wagner.